The Timpanogos Surgeon Search-Trends Frenzy (Claims)
:::danger This claim does not survive inspection — and it names innocent people Every physician named below, and Dr. Deirdre Amaro, is a living person accused of nothing. Being the subject of an internet search is not conduct. The claim rests on an assertion — that Google Trends shows IP addresses — that the cited tool is not capable of producing. Seven named doctors are being publicly implicated on the basis of a chart that cannot say what it is claimed to say. It is published here to be examined, not credited. :::
Claim snapshot
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| The claim | "Israel IPs hunted SEVEN docs" at Timpanogos in a two-week frenzy around July 20, 2025 — seven weeks before the shooting — plus sudden Israeli interest in the medical examiner |
| Raised by | An uncredited Google Trends thread, reproduced twice in the investigation file |
| First surfaced | The claimed activity is dated July 2025; the post circulated after September 2025 |
| Rests on | Anonymous post interpreting aggregated, normalized search-interest graphs — no screenshots, no region settings, no author |
| Evidence rating | THIN — the tool cannot report what is being asserted |
What is alleged
A recirculated Google Trends post claims that in a two-week "frenzy" around July 20, 2025 — roughly seven weeks before the shooting — "Israel IPs hunted SEVEN docs" associated with Timpanogos Regional Hospital. The named physicians and dates given are: Steven Neilman (July 18), Robert Patterson MD (July 23–24), Lee Trotter, Lee Patterson (July 19), Brian Gill (July 22), Richard Rasmussen (July 14), and William Pugh (July 30). The post asks: "Why ALL the emergency surgeons at Kirk's hospital? Same IP? FBI, check those VPNs!"
The same post claims that Medical Examiner Dr. Deirdre Amaro was "barely searched in DC or Utah... but ISRAEL? Sudden interest," and that searches for Timpanogos Regional Hospital itself spiked on June 28, July 3, July 16, and "the DAY BEFORE the shooting." A related note in the file pairs this with a separate reported fact: that Dr. Amaro started working full-time as Utah's chief medical examiner on July 1, 2025.
The ordinary explanation
The decisive objection is that the tool does not do what the post says it does.
Google Trends reports normalized relative interest by broad geographic region on a 0-to-100 scale, indexed to the peak of whatever window you select. It does not expose IP addresses. It cannot identify a searcher. It cannot detect a VPN. It cannot tell you whether traffic came from "one user." It cannot show "the same IP." The post's central evidentiary assertion — IPs — is not something the cited tool is capable of producing at all. The poster's own call to "FBI, check those VPNs" quietly concedes the point: it is a request that someone else go find the data, which is an admission that the data being described is not in the chart being shown.
The volume problem finishes it. For low-volume search terms like the names of individual community surgeons, Google Trends aggressively rounds and suppresses sparse data. A country-level "spike" to 100 can represent a handful of queries, or fewer. The index is dominated by noise. A single journalist, recruiter, patient, medical-directory crawler, or bot can move it from 0 to 100 and back. A graph that looks like an explosion may be five people — and there is no way, from the graph, to know which five or why.
The innocent reading is entirely unremarkable. The named physicians are ordinary practicing doctors whose names appear in hospital directories, insurance and referral listings, and patient-review sites, generating background search traffic year-round in every region. Dr. Amaro starting as chief medical examiner on July 1 is a public appointment — a newly appointed state official's name being searched in the weeks around their appointment is what happens to newly appointed state officials.
And the post is unreplicable by design: no screenshots are provided, no region settings, no comparison terms, no date ranges specified in a form anyone could re-run. There is no author. There is nothing to check.
What would settle it
- Re-run the Trends query with a longer baseline window and a comparison term of similar volume. The normalization effect becomes visible immediately and the "spike" disposes of itself.
- Ask the poster to produce the screenshots, region settings, and date ranges — or to state plainly which field of Google Trends output they believe contains an IP address.
- If anyone genuinely believes foreign parties researched the hospital, that is a subpoena question for Google, not a Trends question — and it belongs on the forced-disclosure list.
- Establish the ordinary baseline: what does search interest for any community surgeon's name look like across a normal year?
Sources
- An uncredited Google Trends thread, reproduced twice in the investigation file ("Timpanogos Surgeons GALORE" / "Israel IPs hunted SEVEN docs"). No author is identified, no URL is recorded, and no screenshots are included in the file.
- "Dr. Deirdre Amaro started working full-time as Utah's chief medical examiner on July 1": investigation file, "Hospital / Medical Examiner" section. No source is cited.